CloudMonix vs native Azure Monitoring

CloudMonix monitors a wide range of data, offering a comprehensive overview of both Azure and standalone resources. Much of the information tracked by CloudMonix is not available in Azure Portal. A comprehensive list of differences by each resource is outlined later in this article.

In addition to monitoring, CloudMonix offers a number of unique automation features designed to provide users with ability to recover their cloud apps and services from production issues. When CloudMonix detects an issue, it can execute automated server reboots, run Powershell scripts, recycle IIS app pools, restart WebApps, start Azure Automation runbooks, etc. These operations are easily configured with a few clicks of a button.

Furthermore, CloudMonix offers an auto-scaling engine that allows for sophisticated auto-scaling conditions of Cloud Services, SQL Azure, WebApps, SQL Data Warehouses, etc. These capabilities are far superior to what is offered in the Azure Portal.

Metrics from various resources can be correlated, aggregated and computed to define advanced conditions for alerts, automation and auto-scaling rules. Contrary to Azure Portal, any signal from the monitored environment can be used in alerts, auto-scaling and self-healing automation.

In addition to real-time self-updating dashboards, CloudMonix allows users to browse their dashboards back in time to when issues occurred for investigation into Root Cause Analysis (RCA). Historical reports provide access to captured data for up to one (1) year. Customers can also ingest data collected by CloudMonix into their own SQL database for custom reporting and analysis.

To ease initial monitoring setup, the product comes built-in with useful metrics and alerts out of the gate. Furthermore, to save on configuration time, monitoring profiles can easily be saved, shared and applied to other resources via “resource templates” functionality.

CloudMonix seamlessly integrates with other popular third party applications, such as PagerDuty, Autotask, Slack, Zendesk, Nagios, Zabbix, and more. Full list of supported integrations is provided later in this article. SSO is supported for customers running Azure AD/ADFS/Office365/Google Apps/etc.

There are a number of features that target Managed Service Providers and other consulting organizations. MSPs can easily manage multiple customers (CSP’s are supported). MSPs can choose to keep their customers in separate CloudMonix sub-accounts and even invite their customers into these sub-accounts. White-labeling is supported.

DevOps can automate monitoring setup of their continuously deployed environments by using CloudMonix REST API. Keeping Production Azure resources or subscriptions separate from DEV/QA services is supported.

Benefits of using CloudMonix for Azure resources

Here are just some of the important differences where CloudMonix tracks more data or provides automation and auto-scaling capabilities that far exceed the default native Azure offering:

Resource Type

CloudMonix Benefits (features that Azure portal doesn’t have)

Azure Windows VMs

Track and alert on

any Windows Performance Counters including custom ones from third party systems

CloudMonix can send a notification message as SMS using Twilio when an alert is triggered and when it is resolved.

Any 3rd party product that is not explicitly covered in this list can still be integrated with by creating custom XML/JSON webhooks. CloudMonix can push notifications when an alert is triggered and when it is resolved.

During every monitoring cycle, host status and metrics can be synchronized to Zabbix.

CloudMonix can push a notification message to specified Zap in Zapier when an alert is triggered and when it is resolved.

CloudMonix can open a new Zendesk ticket when an alert is triggered, and automatically close it when alert is resolved.

Conclusion

Trying CloudMonix is simple and hassle free. Typical setup takes 3-5 minutes and CloudMonix auto-detects everything it can monitor within user’s Azure subscription automatically. Sign up and see for yourself!